Recent History

2011

Andree Cazabon, Maya Gallus, Jane Michener, Summer Love, Brenda Longfellow

ReFrame officially separated from our parent organization Kawartha World Issues Centre and became a non-profit organization called ReFrame Peterborough International Film Festival.
ReFrame recruited an official Board of Directors to work with the Organizing Committee.
ReFrame had the most successful festival in its history. Many more people attended and the community fully embraced ReFrame as a “must do” event.
The Changing Our World high school program was an overwhelming success. Gay Straight Alliance Groups from the Kawartha Pine Ridge District School Board came together for the first time in history
The program included 35 students, 7 KPR schools (north and south), 8 GSA staff advisors, 2 filmmakers, 7 cameras, 1 facilitator, 2 days, energy and food galore, equalling SUCCESS - producing 7 short films that shout out “proud”!

ReFrame’s co-founder and festival coordinator moved overseas for a year. For the first time in ReFrame history the festival was not organized by one of the women who co-founded the festival.
The weather that year was the coldest in our festival’s history

We celebrated our fifth anniversary by giving our festival a new name: ReFrame Peterborough International Film Festival.
We doubled the size of our elementary-school program, REELKids Film Festival, and included workshops led by local artists.
We introduced a one-day high-school program called ReFrame: Changing Our World Film Festival, which included film presentations and workshops.
We added a "Still" ReFrame program of local visual art displays and a new community art project, "Your Inner Artist."
Our International Bazaar was a hit and included wonderful international food, crafts, and merchandise.
We emphasized a greener festival by issuing a one-page program handout, encouraging people to "lug a mug," providing fully compostable takeout containers, and providing reusable dishes.

We formed our first Festival Programming Committee with our community-based volunteers, and we presented our first ever 100 per cent made-in-Peterborough program. The event established a dynamic interconnection between the local and the global; it reflected the interests of our local area and at the same time responded to our audiences' needs while pushing the frontier of new forms and new ideas.

We took another leap forward in programming. The Peterborough festival was now uniquely our own creation. We began by doing an inventory of sorts looking at what was happening in the world and what our local groups and organizations were interested in and concerned about. We then shaped the form and the content of our programming based on these. We still drew on the wonderful package of work from Courtenay, but we were clearly heading in a new direction.
We added more panel discussions with filmmakers and included more question and answer sessions after film screenings.

We included productions that we found on our own (making up one-quarter of our program) and added local filmmakers and performances and exhibitions by local activists and arts groups. We began to actively seek out more work by regional filmmakers and broaden our scope, looking for more and different ways of telling stories and talking about complex issues.
We invited visiting filmmakers to Peterborough for the first time.
The Beginning
We presented a package of films from the World Community Film Festival in Courtenay, B.C. The Courtenay festival made its package available to ReFrame and a number of other like-minded communities across the country.